Voice mail has become a widely used channel of communication in both home and office environments. Conventional voice mail systems allow a sender to leave a message for a recipient to facilitate communication between them, for example, when the recipient is busy or away from a telephone. Typically, such voice mail systems provide the ability to the sender to record and leave an audio message in the recipient's voice mailbox. Some voice mail systems provide the sender with a selection of fixed options that may be applied to a particular voice message. For example, the sender may give priority status to a message so that the recipient will hear such a priority message before hearing other messages in the mailbox. A message may be made private so that the recipient is precluded from forwarding such a private message to other parties. A sender may also have an ability to send a message to multiple recipients.
The recipient of a voice mail message, upon accessing his or her voice mailbox at some convenient time, may then listen to the message sent by the sender. Voice mail systems generally provide the recipient with a number of fixed options such as the ability to save the message, forward the message to other parties, and record a reply message to be forwarded to the sender of the original message.
While many known voice mail systems function quite satisfactorily in many applications, the options that are provided to the users are generic in that no options may be customized and applied to a particular message. Consequently, a need exists for enhanced voice mail capabilities where users would have better control over the information contained in a voice mail message.